It has become almost obligatory to introduce a book on curating by noting the plethora of recent publications on the subject. How, in just a few short years, did we reach this point of saturation? What questions, exactly, do all these books address? Many attempt to offer an overview of the curatorial field as it exists today, or attempt to map its historical trajectory. Others propose a series of case studies under a common curatorial theme. All are hoping to contribute to this relatively new discipline and its accompanying canon. Edited by Jens Hoffmann, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating offers a real critique of existing publications and modes of thinking by explicitly asking the questions that others have missed, ignored or deemed already answered: What is a curator? What is the public? What is art? What about collecting? What is an exhibition? Why mediate art? What to do with the contemporary? What about responsibility? What is the process? How about pleasure? Here, Peter Eleey, Elena Filipovic, Juan A. Gaitán, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Adriano Pedrosa, João Ribas and Dieter Roelstraete each propose and then address one question. Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating takes a back-to-basics approach--a return to a kind of zero-degree state--at a time when a recalibration of what a curator is and does seems both necessary and urgent.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were among the most pictured disasters in history, yet they remain, a decade later, underrepresented in cultural discourse--particularly within the realm of contemporary art. Responding to these conditions, MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey brings together more than 70 works by 41 artists--many made prior to 9/11--to explore the attacks’ enduring resonance. Eschewing both images of the event itself and art made directly in response, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provide a subjective framework within which to reflect upon the attacks and their aftermath, and explore the ways that they have altered how we see and experience the world in their wake. Opening on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, September 11 includes works by Diane Arbus, John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Christo, Ellsworth Kelly, Mary Lucier, Stephen Vitiello and others.

Since 1986, Dutch artist Mark Manders (born 1968) has been developing an ongoing project titled Self-Portrait as a Building. Taking the form of sculptures, installations, drawings and projections, these works map Manders' artistic persona through the conceptual model of a built edifice, in the fashion of the Renaissance memory theater. Inspired by writings on this subject and by other literature, Manders' earliest works in this project were primarily written, but over time, Manders found ways to deploy everyday three-dimensional objects--epoxy figures, animals, teabags, pencils, household furniture--to build a portrait of his own mind as an architectural space. As the artist explains, "this imaginary building, being composed of discrete objects, can shrink or expand at any moment. In this building, all words created by mankind are on hand." This publication accompanies the first North American touring exhibition of Manders' work.

Published by Damiani.Text by Peter Eleey, Jason Smith, Eric Schwab.

Walead Beshty (born 1976) has long used photography as a tool to explore social conditions. In 2001, the artist began documenting the abandoned embassy of the defunct Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in the former East Berlin. This publication focuses on three related bodies of work that continue Beshty's engagement with the invisible territories of globalization.

Published by Creative Time Books.Text by Peter Eleey, Nato Thompson.

In 2007, artist Mike Nelson transformed the disused interior of the Essex Street Market on New York's Lower East Side, taking audiences on a journey through his installation “A Psychic Vacuum,” a series of reconstructed rooms and passageways filled with enigmatic props, clues and assemblies. Over the next two years, the artist meticulously recreated that journey in this superbly designed and fully illustrated artist's book.

Drawing on unconventional means of transformation, such as alchemy and magic, as a way to examine the metaphysical changes that occur when materials are used to conceptualize complex ideas, Now You See It--which includes work by Walead Beshty, Alexandra Bircken, Ceal Floyer, Tom Friedman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wade Guyton, Wolfgang Laib, Robert Morris, William O'Brien, Mitzi Pederson, Dieter Roth, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Anna Sew Hoy, Gedi Sibony, Rudolf Stingel, Lawrence Weiner, Jennifer West and Erwin Wurm--proffers the notion that visual recognition alone is insufficient to determine an object's materiality. In this volume, published concurrently with an exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, the question of materiality is recontextualized--through insightful essays by Aspen Art Museum Director Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and Peter Eeley, Visual Arts Curator of the Walker Art Museum--as more than a mere struggle between content and form. Other contributions are by Paul Valéry and Jeremy Sigler.

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter--to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art--but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or "research" art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider "an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions," and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each "a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going." In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians--among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

Published by Walker Art Center.Text by Peter Eleey, Philip Bither.

Best known for her innovative choreography, which revolutionized Modern dance, Trisha Brown has for many years made drawings and other works beyond the stage that integrate the performing and visual arts. Drawing has long featured prominently in her practice, shifting from a tool for schematic composition into a fully realized component of her broader investigation into the limits of her own body. Whether she is working within the frame of a sheet of paper, on the wall or on the stage, Brown delights in the play between structure and improvisation, between repetition and invention and between choice and chance. This volume, published to accompany an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, presents a broad survey of Brown's visual arts practice going back more than three decades. Featuring over 40 drawings, it includes essays by exhibition curator Peter Eleey and performing arts curator Philip Bither, as well as a specially-commissioned survey of Brown's drawing vocabulary contributed by the artist.

Published by Creative Time Books.Edited by Peter Eleey. Introduction by Anne Pasternak. Text by Alex Farquharson. Interview by Jane &Louise Wilson.

In 2006, with the assistance of the New York public art agency Creative Time, the Turkish-born, London-based video artist Haluk Akakçe launched his monumental Las Vegas installation, Sky is the Limit, above four blocks of open-air casinos, kiosk vendors and vintage neon icons on the infamous strip, Fremont Street. Utilizing the latest technology to create a "realer than real" experience, Haluk Akakçe's work stages a confrontation between artificial and organic life, suggesting both the liberating and alienating power of technology, and evoking an alternate fluid sense of space and time. According to art critic Alex Farquharson, Akakçe opens a view into "a world of seemingly endless possibility…where it seems one may become anything simply by believing in its possibility."

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry and Anne Pasternak. Text by Klaus Biesenbach, Peter Eleey, Doug Aitken.

In January and February of 2007, the Los Angeles-based video artist Doug Aitken projected a new work, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art and the New York arts institution Creative Time, onto seven facades on and around MoMA's fabled West Fifty-third Street building. Sleepwalkers was both inspired by, and offered in opposition to, the densely built midtown environment; it integrated itself onto the surfaces on which it was projected, and it challenged viewers' perceptions of architecture and public space. The piece, which follows the trajectories of five characters as they make their way through nocturnal New York, explores Aitken's key recurring themes: broken and recombined narratives, the rhythm and flow of information and images, and the relationship of individuals to their environment. The viewer, as a pedestrian, a participant and a vital component of New York's energetic system, becomes part of the work, and of the interactive personal landscape that Aitken creates in and among the hard-edged concrete and glass language of Manhattan's architecture. In addition to documentation of Sleepwalkers, this publication contains an overview of the artist's work to date, with special emphasis on works since 2001. It also contains conversations between Aitken and a variety of artists, architects, writers and performers about different elements of city life, from the lit signage of Times Square to a taxi driver's eye view of the streets.

Explosion Project for Central Park

Published by Asia Society/Creative Time.Essays by Peter Eleey. Foreword by Vishakha Desai and Anne Pasternak. Introduction by Gary Garrels.

Commissioned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Central Park, Cai's Light Cycle fireworks display lit the New York sky with a circle of explosions on a September night in 2003. This 24-page accordion book documents it all from planning to performance, executed by the famous Grucci fireworks family. Separating the book's hardbound cloth covers reveals a continuous folded sheet with reproductions of Cai's gunpowder drawings (made by burning scant gunpowder on paper) on one side and photographs of the event and text on the other. In an interview, the artist compares his drawings to “love-making” and explains some technical aspects of his displays, such as a computer chip in each explosive shell.